Scientists used a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, to shoot two beams of gold nuclei at each other at the speed of light.

Hmm… so they managed to accelearate gold nuclei to the speed of light. That’s enough to win the nobel prize right there since it contradicts the most basic principle of special relativity. You’d think that would be front page news. Oh, or else the reporter simply doesn’t understand that “close to the speed of light” and “the speed of light” are two significantly different things when discussing relativistic speeds of subatomic particles. I guess I’ll let you decide whether the scientists have rewritten the laws of physics or the reporter has.

The intense heat of the collision breaks down the nuclei into quarks and gluons, the most basic building blocks of all normal matter.

Hey, I guess that search for the fundamental building blocks of all normal matter is over then. We know that they are quarks and gluons now. Good, I’ve been wondering about that. I guess it’s a good thing we never built that superconducting supercollider after all, no point to it since we’ve resolved the question of what the fundamental building blocks of all normal matter are. Whew, I had thought perhaps we had missed the chance to do some more real science.

These particles then formed a ball of plasma which can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the collision, so creating a black hole.

? This is pretty much nonsensical. “We know it was there because we could detect nothing coming from it.” I’m sure this is not how the scientists explained their detection. I am guessing the explanation had more to do with the detection of particles matching the profile of a microscopic black hole giving of Hawking radiation than it matched the profile of particles being generated from a collision of gold nuclei.

Still, this is an interesting story but it is reported so badly that it is hard to know what really was accomplished, if anything at all. I’ll try to find a story that describes the experiment that was not written by the newspaper’s fashion writer…..

It’s sad what passes for science reporting these days. Of course it makes perfect sense considering that communications and journalism majors are some of the most scientifically illiterate folks on the planet.

Just visit any newsroom out there, especially at your local affiliates. They really are stupid people with no clue how the world works.

Aaron said,

in April 30th, 2006 at 11:50 am

Really? We can create black-holes just by colliding particle beams? Whoooooo!

Unfortunately, they would be ridiculously low-mass black-holes, so it would probably be difficult to detect them. Oh well. Invisible micro-massive black holes for sale! Can’t see ’em, can’t feel ’em, can’t observe ’em without a bubble chamber. Oh wait. They act just like ordinary short lived heavy particles…. oh well.

This all goes back to my fundamental belief that all matter is just balls of energy wound up in itself somehow. Throw more energy at it and you get a bigger or denser ball of energy.

I’ll need to go check out the threshold of schwarzchild radius vs. quantum tunneling distance to see at what point a dense particle starts to “eat” instead of “radiate”. When we start throwing that much energy into “microscopic black holes” we may end up with a problem…

Ah, I’ve got it (if my calculation is roughly correct, it should be close though..). A black hole becomes “stable” in a mass-rich environment a black hole would have to get bigger than about 1 x 10^8 kg, which is roughly the mass of a small mountain, or maybe a large hill. Less massive than that and the quantum tunnelling that results in Schwarzchild radiation causes the black hole to exponentially radiate (meaning it would explode quite spectacularly), and masses greater than that would mean it would stabilize and begin to grow.

So when we start generating black holes that size, I’ll worry about the earth getting sucked into a black hole. I won’t bother trying to figure out the size of a particle accelerator that would generate those kinds of energies. Something on the order of the size of the earth’s orbit, perhaps.

So… here is a post about idiot science writers, I make a bad assumption about microscopic black holes. I assumed first that a black hole with an event radius equal to a proton’s radius would be unstable, but that’s not true, it is unstable in astronomical terms, meaning it would eventually decay, but in human lifetimes, it would be quite stable.

Then I tried to figure out the minimum size based on quantum tunnelling, but I did the math wrong or something.

Finally I found the Wiki page that has the Hawking radiation broken down by size of black holes and according to that the size of a black hole that would have a less than 1 second lifetime, is not 1e8 kg, but 1e5 kg. A factor of 1,000. Sigh. Although it is clear that a black hole that would radiate away into nothingness in a second is not truly a danger, it is clear that a black hole that would last a billion years would be a danger. So somewhere between 1e5 and 1e8 is when a black hole would become dangerous to the earth. I’ll be conservative and say that I think a black hole of 1e6 kg is when I’d start worrying.

All of this is moot in a way. The explosive power of a 1e5 black hole decaying in one second is 5,000,000,000,000 (that’s five TRILLION) tons of TNT. Meaning that’s how much energy you’d have to pump into it to MAKE one. Which ain’t happening anytime soon.

OK, I’ve embarrassed myself enough on this. Whether the math is right this time or not, I’m done with laboratory created black holes for now.

Oh, it is important to note that in decaying a 1e5 kg black hole would generate an explosion of 5,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT (5 million kilotons), so to say it isn’t a danger was pretty wrong. I meant it isn’t a danger to suck in the earth. An explosion of that magnitude could well be something to worry about. If you lived within the blast radius of the lab that is. Which would probably be, oh, about 20,000 miles or so…